Now this is the intermediary result. It took a day longer. I had only limited time to work outside because of the awful weather. Believe it or not, I worked with full winter gown: long underwear, threes shirts and a winter parka.

This starts to look fine to me, but it is not finished yet. First the pot has to change. We will see how we do this. And then there might be some small little editing necessary here and there. I will report soon.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

This Japanese white pine, PInus pentaphylla, was collected in the Japanese mountains many years ago. It was styled in Japan and eventually exported to Europe in 2010. In many exhibits where it was shown soon after that it won major awards, mainly in Poland and Czechia. The tree was owned by Piotr Czerniachowski from Poland.
Somehow this pine found it's way into my garden in December 2012. It had lost some of it's former shape and I had to do some work right away: plucking of old needles, removing some wire which had bitten in seriously already, removing a few small dead branches, jinnign branch on the lower tree. The foliage did not look too healthy which was mainly due to winter color.
I was told by Piotr that this tree needed repotting badly. So I found a new container for it made by Walter Venne from Germany. It was very difficult to get the tree out which indeed had not been repotted probably since way more than ten years.The usual adakdama was hard like cement. I thought I had to break the pot to get it out. Well, finally it gout out without breaking, but using severe force.
Then the rootball was loosened up. Such trees are quite problematic as they have to get repotted at one point but the risk is high. I could have lost the tree. The tree was potted into modern substrate - baked loam with some rough peat. Even after fifteen years without repotting it will go out easily and we will never have this problem as with akadama again. I tilted the tree upwards to the left.
In May it showed that it had not minded the repotting - the contrary, it looked very happy and green. Normally I would say that a tree after all this has to rest until next vegetation period. Well, a week ago it looked as healthy as a white pine ever could. So I decided to do the whole refurbishing right away. Now I am happy for the time being.

One can take a big interesting piece of deadwood and combine it with a
young plant to mimic a very old tree with lots of natural deadwood. This
is something that many people do. Most do it for fun and most of the
time it looks terrible because it is obvious and one sees it
immediately. This kind of tree never should be exhibited at all.

Sometimes it is done well so that even an expert fins it difficult to
tell. This is fine. This kind of tree can be exhibited but it should be
mentioned that it is a tanuki.

Then there are cases when a bit of deadwood is added to a tree which
already has deadwood. This is also fine. Most of the time it is not
mentioned that this is a tanuki.

Sometimes two trees which are alive are fixed together to look like one
tree. Also this is fine if it looks well.

Tanuki is a cheat, a lie. Bonsai art itself is a cheat, a lie, it
creates the illusion of an old tree while the tree is young. To paint
one's face, eyes and lips and hair is a cheat , a lie. So why do so many
people get away with it? Well, if done well and if it looks good then it
is OK. But nobody believes it is for real. Where does the lying start?
Where does it end? How much of a lie is too much?

I believe that more famous trees than one wants to believe are tanukis
of partial tanukis.